Anil Seth
British cognitive scientist exploring predictive processing in perception and self.
Most quoted
"To understand consciousness, we need to move beyond the idea of a 'ghost in the machine' and embrace the idea of a 'machine in the ghost'."
— from Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, 2021
"To understand consciousness, we need to understand how the brain constructs its best guess of the causes of its sensory signals."
— from The Predictive Brain, 2013
"Consciousness is not a single thing, but a collection of different properties, each of which can be scientifically investigated."
— from Interview with The Guardian, 2018
All quotes by Anil Seth (102)
Being you is the feeling of being you, but it's not what you think.
Free will is the brain's way of making choices feel real.
The world is not as it seems; it's as our brains make it.
Consciousness arises from the interaction of brain and body.
We are all hallucinating all the time; when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it reality.
The self is a story the brain tells itself.
Prediction errors drive learning and perception.
Emotions are predictions about the body's state.
Reality is a controlled hallucination.
The brain doesn't see; it infers.
Consciousness is the culmination of predictive processing.
We live in a world of our own making.
The hard problem of consciousness is a prediction problem.
Sensory input is just a constraint on our hallucinations.
The mind is what the brain creates when it talks to itself.
Perception is Bayesian inference.
Our sense of self is a useful fiction.
Hallucinations are the norm; veridical perception is the exception.
Consciousness connects us to the world through prediction.
The brain is an organ of prediction.
Contemporaries of Anil Seth
Other Cognitive Sciences born within 50 years of Anil Seth (1972).